Narration and Voicelessness in The Woman in White

What is the impact of Wilkie Collins's multiple first-person narrators in The Woman in White?

I was strolling along the lonely high-road—idly wondering—when every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me. I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick. There—as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London.¹

John Atkinson Grimshaw, A Moonlit Evening (1880), detail. Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. This painting, unrelated to the novel, is not entirely faithful to the nighttime encounter with the Woman in White. In the novel, the encounter is on a summer night. But the painting is too beautiful not to include.

Collins’s “No Hearsay” Narrative Strategy

The fate of the white-clad figure is a central mystery in Wilkie Collins’s 1860 sensation novel The Woman in White. The plotting – both of the novel itself and of its villains – is complicated. In drawing the reader through its twists and turns, Collins deploys a narrative strategy that, he asserts, “has not (so far as I know) been hitherto tried in fiction.”² Collins has his protagonist, Walter Hartright, explain the strategy as follows:

As the Judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now. No circumstance of importance … shall be related on hearsay evidence. When the writer of these introductory lines (Walter Hartright by name) happens to be more closely connected than others with the incidents to be recorded, he will describe them in his own person. When his experience fails, he will retire from the position of narrator; and his task will be continued … by other persons who can speak to the circumstances under notice from their own knowledge …. Thus, the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness—with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect; and to trace the course of one complete series of events, by making the persons who have been most closely connected with them, at each successive stage, relate their own experience, word for word.³

The story begins with this explanation; and then, as if Walter is calling himself as the first witness at a trial, it opens with his own narrative: “Let Walter Hartright … be heard first.”⁴

Walter’s narrative reads much as it would in any novel with a first-person narrator. We learn of his work as a drawing master; the new situation he obtains at Limmeridge House in Cumberland; his strange encounter with the terrified woman in white, who has escaped from an asylum and is being pursued. The narrative comes to us from a considerable temporal remove, which is evident from asides such as: “Little did I think then—little did I think afterwards … that the opportunity … was soon to come.”⁵

Strangely, the story of the woman in white is connected with his new situation, where he is a private drawing tutor for two young ladies, Laura Fairlie – with whom he falls in love – and her half-sister, Marian Halcolmbe. Walter despairs when he learns that Laura is engaged to Sir Percival Glyde. He makes an emotional departure from Limmeridge before Sir Percival comes to claim his reluctant bride, who is in love with Walter.

I won’t continue to trace the plot, lest I violate the no-spoilers principle. Suffice it to say that the story concerns the 19^th century version of identity theft, with the mysterious woman in white and Laura Fairlie as the principal victims, and Sir Percival and his mysterious Italian friend, Count Fosco, as the primary plotters.

But there is more to say about Collins’s innovative narrative technique.

Frederick Walker, The Woman in White (1871). Walker developed this poster for the theatrical adaptation of the novel, which was written by Collins himself.

Voices and Vantages: Character Through Narration

Collins’s technique of presenting a series of first-person narrators gives him considerable freedom in the development of his characters. Collins commented on this issue in an 1861 preface to the novel:

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character⁠—for this plain reason, that the effect produced by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible, in novel writing, to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters ….⁶

Creating a separate voice for each character allows Collins to illuminate the personas the characters display to others, although it denies us access to any inner thoughts the characters are unwilling to disclose. As Dickens’s novels illustrate, though, a character’s exterior appearance and utterances are often a transparent window into even the most closely guarded aspects of the character’s interior.

In Walter, Collins creates a protagonist who at first is a sentimental young man with much to learn from the adversity he will undergo. His romantic impulses predominate as he describes Laura:

Think of her as you thought of the first woman who quickened the pulses within you …. Let the kind, candid blue eyes meet yours, as they met mine …. Let her voice speak the music that you once loved best, attuned as sweetly to your ear as to mine. Let her footstep, as she comes and goes, in these pages, be like that other footstep to whose airy fall your own heart once beat time. Take her as the visionary nursling of your own fancy; and she will grow upon you, all the more clearly, as the living woman who dwells in mine.⁷

By the end, however, Walter is a man of action, matching wits with Count Fosco in a dangerous game in which Fosco considers “add[ing] to the disorder in this room by scattering your brains about the fireplace.“⁸

Marian, the other protagonist of the novel, occupies a unique position by virtue of being the only narrator whose story emerges from a contemporaneously written diary. Her entries show her to be a daring and resourceful adversary to Sir Percival and Count Fosco during the period when she and Laura are prisoners at Sir Percival’s estate. Marian’s diary has an immediacy that contrasts well with the other more retrospective accounts. One amusing juxtaposition of entries occurs as she is trying to size up Sir Percival upon his arrival at Limmeridge House: an initial entry describes him as “handsome, agreeable, full of good feeling towards the unfortunate and full of affectionate kindness towards me.” The next opens: “I hate Sir Percival! I flatly deny his good looks. I consider him to be eminently ill-tempered and disagreeable, and totally wanting in kindness and good feeling.”⁹

Marian is a very acute observer:

Most men show something of their disposition in their own houses, which they have concealed elsewhere, and Sir Percival has already displayed a mania for order and regularity, which is quite a new revelation of him …. If I take a book from the library and leave it on the table, he follows me and puts it back again. If I rise from a chair, and let it remain where I have been sitting, he carefully restores it to its proper place against the wall.

Marian is drawn to Count Fosco, even though she recognizes that he exercises a strange power over others: “I am almost afraid to confess it, even to these secret pages. The man has interested me, has attracted me, has forced me to like him. In two short days he has made his way straight into my favourable estimation, and how he has worked the miracle is more than I can tell.” Her liking for Fosco does not diminish the boldness with which she works to undermine the plot that he has devised to benefit himself and Sir Percival.

In the confession Count Fosco is ultimately forced to write, he shows himself to be flamboyant, clever, and unscrupulous. One unexpected aspect of his character is his deep admiration for Marian (“With what inconceivable rapidity I learnt to adore that woman.”) Fosco is a world-class egoist. He claims to stand “on a supreme moral elevation.” When he refers to his instincts, he notes that they “seldom err.” As he recounts how he bamboozled Laura’s uncle, he proclaims: “I came, saw, and conquered Fairlie.” And at the end of his narrative, he asserts, “I announced on beginning it that this narrative would be a remarkable document. It has entirely answered my expectations.”¹⁰

The Puppet Master

Although Collins allows his characters their individuality, he illuminates the power of authorship by setting up Walter Hartright as the master narrator who controls what events the others relate and in what sequence they are related. Walter’s accounts come first and last in the novel. Although the beginning of the novel has a quasi-judicial flavor, Walter clarifies that he has pieced together the entire story for his own private purposes, not for any legal proceeding. Thus, he is free to shape it as he sees fit. In the words of Count Fosco, “One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?” The novel’s arrangement of ideas confirms that Walter does.

The “witnesses” confirm that they are requested or required to recount their stories. Gilmore, the family solicitor, opens his account by acknowledging that he “write[s] these lines at the request of my friend, Mr. Walter Hartright.”¹¹ Laura’s lazy, effete uncle complains that he writes under compulsion:

It is the grand misfortune of my life that nobody will let me alone. Why—I ask everybody—why worry me? … The last annoyance that has assailed me is the annoyance of being called upon to write this Narrative…. I am threatened if I fail to exert myself in the manner required, with consequences which I cannot so much as think of without perfect prostration…. I am told to remember dates. Good heavens! I never did such a thing in my life—how am I to begin now?¹²

Count Fosco writes his own narrative only after finding himself trapped by Walter and in fear of his life. And the narratives of Gilmore, Laura’s uncle, and Fosco are but a few examples of Walter’s control over the story as a whole.

John McLenan, “Hush,” she whispered. “I hear something behind us” (1860), detail. Illustration from The Woman in White, American serialization in Harper’s Weekly. This illustration depicts Laura Fairlie and her half-sister Marian Halcombe. A key plot element is that both the enigmatic Woman in White and Laura Fairlie often wear white.

Even Marian recedes into the background in the latter half of the novel as Walter’s voice becomes dominant. Illness terminates her efforts to discover and thwart the conspiracy, and her diary ends as she is incapacitated. (Count Fosco finds the diary and audaciously adds a final entry: “I lament afresh the cruel necessity which sets our [his and Marian’s] interests at variance, and opposes us to each other. Under happier circumstances how worthy I should have been of Miss Halcombe—how worthy Miss Halcombe would have been of ME.”¹³) Although Marian is an important character through to the end of the novel, she never again resumes the role of narrator. Walter shapes the story with other voices.

A final observation about the potency of authorship: Collins’s novel tells the story of two women, Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick (the woman in white), who lose their freedom, identity, sanity, and in one case, life. And while their voices are heard through the narration of other characters, neither one ever speaks for herself in the pages of the novel. Their lack of voice—and agency—intensifies the other losses and indignities that they endure.

At the outset, the text proclaims: “This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.“¹⁴ And the story’s framing requires the female characters’ patience in the face of the resolution evident in Fosco—who appropriates Marian’s private diary to himself, thus framing her narrative—and Walter, who muffles the voice of the woman he loves and presents Anne Catherick’s story entirely through other speakers. At the last, the reader is left to wonder whether the voicelessness imposed on Laura and Anne reinforces the gravity of the crimes committed against them—and whether the story’s authors—Collins and his framing narrator Walter—are, in a way, complicit in the erasure of their identities.¹⁵

1. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860) [“TWIW”], “The [First] Narrrative of Walter Hartright.” I omitted ellipses for clarity in the excerpt I quoted. The text in full is as follows:

I had mechanically turned in this latter direction, and was strolling along the lonely high-road—idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would look like—when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me.

I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick.

There, in the middle of the broad bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.

2. Wilkie Collins, TWIW, August 1860 Preface.

3. TWIW, Preamble.

4. Id.

5. TWIW, First Epoch, The Narrative of Walter Hartright, of Clements Inn, London.

6. Wilkie Collins, TWIW, February 1861 Preface.

7. TWIW, First Epoch, The Narrative of Walter Hartright, of Clements Inn, London.

8. TWIW, Third Epoch, Hartright’s Narrative.

9. All quotations from Marian Halcombe come from TWIW, The Narrative of Marian Halcombe, Taken from her Diary.

10. TWIW, The Narrative of Isidor Ottavio Baldassare Fosco.

11. TWIW, The Narrative of Vincent Gilmore, Solicitor, of Chancery-Lane, London.

12. TWIW, The Narrative of Frederick Fairlie, Esq., of Limmeridge House.

13. TWIW, The Narrative of Marian Halcombe, Postscript by a Sincere Friend.

14. TWIW, Preamble.

15. See generally Pamela Perkins and Mary Donaghy, “A Man’s Resolution: Narrative Strategies in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White,“ in Studies in the Novel 22:392-402 (1990). Perkins and Donaghy focus on Walter’s efforts to dominate the narrative, but they interpret this as Collins’s “critique of [a]gender-based system.” (400.) I am skeptical of this interpretation.